WebProNews

A dark future tale by Cory Doctorow spoke of a Department of Homeland Security enforcing immigration laws, and others, with the help of Google. He may not have been far off the mark. At DHS, researchers working in the Directorate for Science & Technology are on a mission to head off terrorist attacks, by developing a way to assemble "fuzzy data" into a clearer picture.

Visual analytics will be the key. Science Blog said "analysts must meld the encyclopedic eye of Google with the inductive genius of Sherlock Holmes" to accomplish this.

The inspiration of Edward Tufte, visual data display legend, motivates the ongoing work by DHS and its associated research partners:

The centers’ interdisciplinary researchers are automating how analysts recognize and rate potential threats. Mathematicians, logicians, and linguists make the collective universe of data assume a meaningful shape. They assign brightness, color, texture, and size to billions of known and apparent facts, and they create rules to integrate these values so threats stand out.

For example, a day’s cache of video, cell phone calls, photos, bank records, chat rooms, and intercepted emails may take shape as a blue-gray cloud. If terror is afoot in L.A. and Boston, those cities are highlighted on a U.S. Map.

In Doctorow's Scroogled, the author considers a future where Google becomes omnipresent by virtue of allying with the federal government.

"The U.S. government had lavished $15 billion on a program to fingerprint and photograph visitors at the border, and hadn't caught a single terrorist. Clearly, the public sector was not equipped to Do Search Right," reads a line of Doctorow's fiction.

But if the DHS researchers can achieve a parallel development to Google, one that sifts through fuzzy data and highlights potential threats, they will tout it as an important tool in fighting terrorism. It could be an entirely correct claim.

The real issues come later, after the technology will have proven itself. In a world where high-ranking government intelligence functionaries suggest that privacy is an outdated concept, how long would it take for such a technology to be "repurposed" for other uses, against citizens under the guise of anti-terrorism or law enforcement?

They'll say it will be for the greater good. Wait and see.

follow me on Twitter